7 DIY Resources to Help You Create a Successful Website

According to recent data from Pingdom, there are over 634 million websites in the world, 51 million of which was created in 2012. Over 70 million websites are hosted on WordPress, the most popular open source CMS available online.

One thing is for certain, though, a significant portion of these websites created every year fail. In fact, data has shown that the top 515 websites on the internet generate 45% of overall website traffic; this begs the question, if just 515 websites generate 45% of all internet traffic, what happens to the remaining 600+ million websites on the internet?

What this shows is that a significant portion of websites created (perhaps 99% of all websites?) will never amount to anything.

There’s a lot that goes into creating a successful website and it’s far from just setting up a domain name and then forgetting everything else; you need to choose the right niche, choose the right web host, choose the right domain name and create an appealing website. And let’s face it, majority of the hundreds of millions of people who own a website can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars building the kind of website they want; whether it is design, choosing the right tools or building the foundation of your website, sometimes you just have to do it all yourself!

If you want to create a successful website from scratch, here are 7 resources that will be of immense help.

Wordpress is the best CMS and with its flexibility, good code and wide use all over the internet, its impact can be critical for every business. However, if we’re being honest, WordPress is not for everyone.

Depending on what kind of site you want to build, hiring WordPress developers will often cost several thousands of dollars or even tens of thousands of dollars.

Easy WebContent simplifies the process of creating websites by making it easy to build the website of your liking using drag and drop features and then publishing it as it is to your web page; you can also connect your own custom domain name to it.

While Easy WebContent is a great website builder, it isn’t for everyone; there are dozens of other site builders you might want to use or compare.

Websitebuilder.net is a compendium of information on site builders; you’ll find site builders you’ve used before as well as those you are only hearing about for the first time. You’ll also be able to compare features, pricing, as well as the capability of each site builder mentioned.

At the time of writing this post, there are over 20 site builders reviewed that can help you create personal sites, blogs or even full-fledged ecommerce sites.

Like I said earlier on in this article, WordPress powers over 75 million websites – that’s more than 10% of all websites online – and more than 40% of the top hundred blogs are hosted on WordPress.

If you want to use WordPress and you have the patience to learn and figure things out on your own, then the tutorials provided by WordPress Basic will be very helpful. The tutorials are in video format and are very helpful; you’ll learn everything from setting up WordPress to installing plugins and even configuring permalinks on your WordPress blog.

Similar to WordPress Basic above, the iThemes WordPress tutorials section provides quick tutorials on every aspect of WordPress; everything you need to know about WordPress, from knowing how WordPress works to knowing how to use images and embed links inside your articles is explained.

Unlike WordPress Basic, though, the videos provided by iThemes are very short; in other words, you can learn everything you need to know about using WordPress as a complete beginner in less than one hour.

If you’re looking for website themes, graphic elements and all kinds of design elements required for building a successful website, Theme Forest is the #1 resource online.

Owned by Envato, Theme Forest is a community of designers that produce some of the best design elements online; you’ll find themes your website can run on whether your site is built on HTML or whether it is powered by a CMS like WordPress.

Once you have your website and you start getting the word out about it, it’s important to track visits and actions on your website so that you know what people are doing on it and what page people are most active on.

While there are hundreds of quality web tracking apps online, Clicky analytics is a great one for example, Google Analytics gives you the most capability without you having to pay no matter how well your site grows.

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